James 'DexX' Dominguez

Fright Nights, the annual Halloween event at the Warner Bros Movie World theme park on the Gold Coast, started as an opportunity to ride roller-coasters in the dark.

While there were park employees in spooky costumes and a few dark and creepy corners where park attendees might get a fright, the focus was on the rides. However, as the years went on, the live action attractions in the park became more of a draw, with larger and more elaborate horror mazes being built to give the punters a serious scare.

In keeping with the Hollywood theme of the park, many of these mazes were themed after famous horror films, such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Saw and the TV series The Walking Dead. This year, however, the park is giving the public something experimental and new: a video game tie-in.

Chris Grew has been the lead maze designer at Movie World ever since the horror events began, but his history with the park goes back much further. "I've been working here as a performer for 18 years," he says. "I've played every character under the sun: The Penguin, The Joker, Mr Freeze, Snape from Harry Potter – I tend to play all the bad guys."

After running around terrifying guests while dressed as Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, six years ago Grew was given the job of designing enclosed mazes for Fright Nights. He recalls that in the beginning he was working on a "shoestring budget" but the arrival of bigger crowds and popular film brands meant more money.

Now he is working on a video game brand, horror-meister Shinji Mikami's upcoming horror epic The Evil Within. This is Mikami's return to the genre he helped to define as lead designer on Resident Evil 1 and 4, and for Grew this is a very personal project.

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"This is the first year I've been given licence to source my own IP for the mazes. Because I'm a gamer, the first place I went was games launching around Halloween," he explains. "It was perfect, because The Evil Within popped up."

As a long-time fan of the post-apocalyptic Fallout series, Grew was familiar with game publisher Bethesda, but getting in contact was his first challenge.

"The furthest I got by myself was working out they have an office in Sydney," he says. "When I saw they have an Australian office I thought there had to be a way. I had to go through friends of friends, lecturers at Bond University, and their students who had graduated and were now working in the industry and knew other people."

He finally got a message through and Bethesda was keen. "I wanted it to be authentic," Grew says. "I want it to use in-game audio, in-game textures and 3D renders of all the characters, and they gave us access to all of that so we could design our maze."

One of the most remarkable aspects of the maze is that it will be the first time objects from the game have existed in the real world. Grew's team has not only tried to make the maze and its inhabitants look like the game world; the sets and costumes have been made using actual game assets.

One of the most visually striking enemies in the game is a hulking brute with a metal safe where his head should be. This box was made using printouts of the actual in-game textures on adhesive vinyl.

"They're super-high resolution," Grew says, "so we expanded them and printed them on vinyl so we could precisely replicate the costumes. We've never done that kind of detail before. The textures on the walls are in-game textures too."

There is more to these mazes than scaring the pants off people, though. Grew says there is a precise science to keeping people flowing through the dim, winding corridors.

"Every scare has to be designed in such a way that it doesn't hinder people's progress through the maze. All of the actors are trained to scare people into a certain direction. I'll make it as scary as I can, as long as I keep them moving in the correct direction."

"The worst thing that can happen, for me, is if I make a critical error in the design and create a bottleneck somewhere, where it's too scary and people refuse to go any further. That's a catastrophic failure.

"Never scare them to the point where they stop."

Fright Nights opens on October 3 and runs on Friday and Saturday nights until Halloween. Also featured are a maze based on the film Wolf Creek 2 and two original mazes about killer clowns and Jack the Ripper.